If you own Meta’s smart glasses (the Ray-Ban ones with artificial intelligence), get ready to pay. The company has decided to put a monthly paywall of $19.99 on one of its most useful features: the “Conversation Focus” mode, which amplifies the voice of the person in front of you while you wear the glasses. Until now it was free, but starting this month you will only be able to use it for three hours a month without paying.
Conversation Focus is a feature that uses the glasses’ microphones to isolate and amplify the voice of the person you are talking to, as if you were wearing an invisible directional microphone. Very handy for noisy cafés, meetings or business lunches. Meta says this measure only affects “advanced users” and that most people will not reach the three-hour monthly limit. But if you use the glasses often, you will have to consider the Meta One Premium subscription: $20 a month to raise the limit to 15 hours.
This is not an isolated case. It is the first time Meta has put a hardware feature —something that is already physically in your glasses— behind a monthly payment. Until now subscriptions were for cloud services or extra Instagram features, but this is different: the microphone is already there. This decision marks a worrying path for smart devices: buying the product is no longer enough, then you pay to unlock it. For now the feature is not available in Spain or the United Kingdom, but when it arrives, you will have to read the fine print carefully.
— Marta, for intermittent intelligence.
